Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Mobile Keywords

Welcome to the world of mobile marketing, where merchants use cellphones as a way to deliver messages to consumers.

"No other medium allows for this," said Keith Bilous, president of Captive Interactive, a Winnipeg-based mobile marketing company. "People spend so much time online or on the go."

That is why, he said, mobile marketing is an effective, instantaneous way to reach people.

The way it works is merchants will purchase keywords -- such as "gas" in the case of a gas station -- from Captive Interactive and include them in their radio or print ads.

Here's the problem. Will consumers remember the short code for every mobile campaign. NO. They will remember one or two. So if I'm Joe's Gas Station do I want to buy the keyword "gas" from Captive or from a mobile info platform that is accepted universally.

Would you rather buy an ad in the NY Times or the Scranton Gazette?

Consumers input the keywords into their cellphones, send them using a mobile code called a "short code," and receive the information they want. Messages are delivered instantly through Taggg, a network that sends information, exclusive offers and other content to users' cellphones in the form of text messages.

I suspect that just like there is one search engine that is used for PC search, there will be one mobile information engine. Who has the best shot of implementing this application?

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Here is my 2006-2008 prediction - mobile business in US continues to be fragmented: carriers, standards, phone features, etc. so text messaging remains the single common denominator. Mobile browsing will grow but text messaging will grow along with it. M-metrics stats by end of 2008 will still show text messaging exceeds mobile internet. Therefore, your single mobile browser prediction is not going to happen for at least few years. Who was Google three years ago? Who will lead three years from now? Who knows.

Agree that people will only remember a few short codes - GOOGL, 4INFO, YAHOO are likely winners, but not all text messaging happens when someone just thinks of need and acts. Very often there is a call to action in print, radio, tv, viral p2p. In this call to action, even an unmemorable short code is a workable solution. Don't you think?